About 12 years ago, I wrote, “I will, however, write about a place that needed less detailed notes: the Royal Oak Orchard, near Harvard, Illinois, where I took the whole family a week ago Saturday. It’s a U-Pick-Em orchard, the sort of place that one never thinks to go without small children…. Besides the rows of apple trees open to all pickers, there was a fruit shop, restaurant, souvenir shop, shack shop, playground, petting zoo, rings for campfires, a hayride, and a teepee inscribed with Bible verses.”

I took a favorite As-We-Were picture at the orchard that day, September 18, 2004.
Don’t know who the fellow in the green shirt was. Just standing around, probably. It makes me wonder how many images, scattered around in all sorts of places, I’ve accidentally gotten myself into.

To continue: “It was a fine day for picking, sunny and warm, and we had a pleasant drive into the exurbs. The orchard is about five miles east of Harvard, a town hard against the Illinois-Wisconsin line. I’d estimated that it would take an hour to get there; Yuriko thought it would be two hours; it worked out to be an hour and a half, true to the spirit of compromise in a marriage.”

Lilly was into the spirit of apple-picking.
“We got down to the business of picking apples, yellow ones and red ones and colors in between, with variety names that I don’t recall (guess I could use some notes). Regardless of their names, they were all tasty apples. Many of them were low enough for Lilly to reach, and even Ann sampled a number of different ones, though actual picking was a little beyond her.”

I had a fine time myself.

We’d picked apples the year before at a place I don’t remember so well, and the next year we went back to Royal Oak Orchard, but got rained on, and bought a bag instead of picking them.

No such problem in 2004: “Afterwards we repaired to the picnic area to eat lunch. A sign prohibited outside food, that is, picnic lunches such as the one we brought, but we ignored this. Pop Christian music played unobtrusively, but distinctly, from a speaker near the snack shop. Curious, but purveying apples and spreading the Gospel doesn’t seem mutually exclusive.”

We haven’t picked any U-Pick-Em apples since. Just one of those things you never quite get around to again, and then everyone’s lost interest.